


Three Strikes

by Qeztotz



Category: Ace Combat
Genre: Minor Character Death, Spare Squadron, Video Game: Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, lighthouse war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:15:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28345995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Qeztotz/pseuds/Qeztotz
Summary: He wanted to fight them. Not for mankind. Not for honour and glory. Not even to say that he could. But because he wanted to know if he could.Was he the pilot he thought he was?Was he king of the skies?An introspection of Trigger through the Lighthouse war. Written in the same style as the in-game cutscenes.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14





	1. Stick with Trigger and you'll make it!

In the very beginning he was worried about the three stripes that marked his plane.

Three strikes, three sin lines. The highest in the group. Only Spare 8 ‘Champ’ had two in the rest of the formation.

That made him a target. If he were an enemy pilot he’d be looking at those as kill markings, painting a target on his back.

In the very beginning he was worried. But shortly afterwards he came to accept them. While they absolutely garnered attention from enemy fighters, it alleviated the pressure on the rest of the squadron.

Spare Squadron wasn’t bad. They just lacked coordination. No-one flew in pairs, no-one tailed another target, watched each other’s backs. But individually most of them were a decent match to the enemy pilots, enough so that with Trigger pulling the aggro they could peel off a couple of kills from the swarm.

Tabloid learnt the quickest. “Stick with Trigger and you’ll make it!” Before long he had a permanent wingman. Spare 15 and Spare 11 wasn’t strictly the proper way to pair up planes, but then he’d never heard of a fifteen-callsign squadron before, so there was that.

And Tabloid was good. Not as good as trigger, not even as good as count when he wasn’t inflating his kills, but he worked well in a pair. Trigger would lead and pick off targets where he could, and if anyone got smart ideas about tailing him then Tabloid would be there to dissuade them. Of course Trigger returned the favour when Tabloid got in trouble, and the two of them began to rack up a rather nice kill count between them.

That really displeased count. But unfortunately neither he nor any of the others learned to play smart, they all did their own thing, and it worked but with several close shaves. Which the scrap queen had something to say about.

On the ground however they did start to coalesce. First day he’d arrived and Count had started a fistfight with another pilot over stealing a kill. Now they shared a meal and laughed about how one had assisted the other on a difficult opponent.

It wasn’t war for Spare Squadron. It wasn’t life or death, it wasn’t kill or be killed.

It was a game. Kill counts were just the most visible part of it.

None of them, Trigger included, had any family. Oh they all wanted to live. But nobody expected to, so why not go out with a bang? Highest score wins. Death in combat adds two ranks after all.

But nobody died. At least nobody Trigger was acquainted with. They were skilled enough and their enemies green enough that nothing could touch them. Nothing could touch them when Trigger was around.

“Stick with Trigger and you’ll make it.”

They really did. Four missions. Five missions. Six. They kept wiping pieces off the board.

He was told by the commanding officer that they were “as effective as a regular squadron.”

A regular squadron had half the planes they had. Used half the ammunition they used. But ammo was cheaper than planes. Fuel was effectively limitless, even for a penal squadron.

So while other squadrons fought and died, Spare looked the reaper in the face and laughed.

A game. Each mission another roll of the dice and they always came up double six.

And that was what got them in the end. Missions kept getting rougher. And it stopped being a game.

High Roller was lost chasing easy targets over the desert, a swarm of drones picked him clean. A stupid mistake that could have been avoided had he been flying with a wingman.

Only the first of many. Spare 2 and 4, lost over the ocean striking an enemy carrier group. Both flying high and caught by SAM.

But still they didn’t learn. They did however fly more cautiously. No more high flying in front of SAM sites. Instead of easy targets they focused down the threats first.

But they still flew alone.

Tabloid got better. He was good with the thinking, slow with the stick. Being stuck to Trigger fixed that. Now he could dogfight. Count got faster too. More confident. Didn’t fly for the clouds at the first sign of an enemy interceptor.

Every now and then an enemy ace would poke his head, or a swarm of drones would appear, and the call would go out;

“Stick with Trigger and you’ll make it!”

He took them out and protected the rest of the Squadron. Aces fell like they were going out of fashion. Drones were just scrap that didn’t know it yet.

Honestly, sometimes he’d finish a mission and AWACS Bandog would begrudgingly inform him he’d knocked out another ace, and he honestly couldn’t tell you which of the fighters he’d just downed they were.

If you believed what Tabloid told the base personnel, where Trigger looked man and machine died. It just fuelled the myth.

“Stick with Trigger and you’ll make it!”

And then he’d met his match.

Cyclops falling back was the simple part. Terrain was difficult. Lightning was worrisome. But then Sol came out of the clouds.

Champ had gone down to Mr.X, Mihaly Shilage. He’d engaged against the orders and died for it.

For the rest of Spare this would have been a good place to die. An ace who could finally equal Trigger. If not here, then where else would a good death be found? Perhaps the enemy felt the same way, for he only targeted trigger.

Which was lucky for Tabloid. The guy was determined, and stuck to Trigger like glue, following the insane twists and turns. He even loosed a couple of missiles, though none hit.

And then, in a turn nobody expected, both survived.

He got a chewing out from AWACS. Solitary.

It didn’t matter. For the first time in the skies, Trigger had felt something other than adrenaline. He’d felt fear. The swarms of drones had put him in danger, but that was just a challenge of the body. Mihaly had been a challenge for the mind. Which way did he turn. Could he make that fast pass or would it expose him. Turnfight or powerfight? Flares or a flick? It was exhilarating.

He’d been singled out. Champ was killed for his two Sin Lines. Trigger had been targeted for the same. The risk of carrying something that looked dangerously like kill markings had finally come to bite them in the ass.

But the rest of the squadron was alive, and most of Cyclops too.

And Tabloid made it out too. He’d been up there with Trigger in the direct line of fire between two aces, and he’d survived.

“Stick with Trigger and you’ll make it!”


	2. Three Strikes and You're Out

Erusian command quickly learned about the three strikes, but not their meaning. Previously Trigger had been marked as an ace, but it was because of the number of fighters that Spare Squadron had collectively downed. Spare was such a mess of a squadron, with such a high kill ratio, that they were collectively treated as having at least one ace pilot, though who it was hadn’t been identified.

‘The White Strikes’ were previously renowned for their suicidal flying, that changed overnight.

‘White Strikes’ was gone. Now there was just ‘Three Strikes’.

A squadron with one or two aces? That was interesting enough to start building a dossier on the unit from survivor accounts and gun-cam footage.

Similar dossiers, Trigger would later learn, were also built for a small number of other Osean Airforce groups, including Cyclops and Strider, but notably not Mage or Gargoyle.

An ace good enough to make Mihaly Shilage turn back and run? That got Trigger some personal attention.

They found his file. His name, his TAC, family tree, birthplace, first school, university, their electronic warfare even found out his scores from the flight academy. But nothing the Eruseans could find told them the meaning behind Three Strikes.

And that lead to the myth amongst the Erusean pilots.

“Three strikes and you’re out.”

Trigger chuckled at that. Or at least Tabloid claimed he did.

Morale was high, each mission more kills racked up. Trigger knew that someone on the base was keeping count for him. It might even be Count himself. But he’d stopped after thirty, long ago. Simple kills. Effortless.

He lived to fly. The adrenaline of high-g turns, pointing straight up and reaching out to the sky, freedom from earthly concerns.

And here at 444th squadron, there was one thing he fixated upon. Mr.X.

He honed himself for the day he’d duel Sol 1 again.

And in the meanwhile he flew, and killed.

Every victory gained them another mission, every mission containing a new and exciting way to die.

But they refused. Spare refused. Trigger refused.

Their next death wasn’t to ground fire or to an enemy ace, it was from themselves. Bandog turned Count loose on Full-Band.

Too much focus on target FFID, not enough on visual confirmation, and for the first time in his life Trigger wondered if he should speak up more often.

Beyond target calls, and foxes, he rarely spoke. Maybe he could have saved Full-Band, he could have called that he had no radar contacts, could have paid more attention to the number of friendly aircraft.

He should have encouraged them to form two fighter teams.

Their inexperience, their disorganisation, and the probable intentional marking of enemy by Bandog, had gotten one of them killed again.

But command didn’t want to know about a blue on blue between penal units. They wanted to know about the newest threat.

Enemy drone fighters, mimicking Super-Hornets, had been identified and destroyed. And that cast doubt over the circumstances of Harling’s assassination. Doubts that Trigger hadn’t himself shared.

He’d thought, up until that point, that he was guilty. Enemy drones in close contact with the Chinook, a heatseeker that locked on the wrong target, anything could have happened. Others had better eyes, and gave their accounts as he did. He’d made a mistake. Unfortunately someone had died for him to learn from it.

But the drone Super-Hornets made him doubt himself for the first time. Perhaps he hadn’t been the one to fire the shot. Perhaps he’d been perfectly on target. Or perhaps it was how he first imagined.

He could barely recall the mission, but now he remembered something about it had felt off. Another group of fighters joining halfway through, some complaint about lack of information on the mission.

It made a kind of sense. Specifically the kind of sense that command liked.

They were all pardoned.

Trigger almost certainly, in the eyes of command, wasn’t a murderer, and the others had all been convicted of petty crimes, easily forgivable in light of their considerable war contribution.

And as their final orders, half were sent across the continent to an unsecured warzone, and the other two, Count and Trigger, were escorting the megalomaniac commander to a cushy posting.

They’d given Trigger back his freedom, and they’d taken Tabloid away from him. Just as Spare 11 had been starting to become a great pilot.

Count was good, in his own way, but he could never Gel with Trigger like Tabloid did. Count was good with his fingers and feet, fast on the stick, fast in the air, quick to the kill, and he knew it. But he ran to bits under pressure, and was hot headed. He would be a perfect pilot for a Warthog if anyone could persuade him that track-targets were just as juicy as those with wings.

But tabloid was Trigger’s perfect wingman. Where Count was fast with his craft, Tabloid was fast with his head. He was able to see what Trigger was thinking, what Trigger was going to do. No matter how quick Count was or would be, he wouldn’t ever be able to react quick enough to Trigger’s moves. A wingman had to not just be quick enough to respond, but to know what their wingman was doing. Instinct. It was just as important as skill.

No use crying over spilt milk. A new threat faced him.

An advanced drone was the first thing to strain him since Mihaly. It had some designation, but Trigger only learned about it afterwards.

Good on the defence, slow on the attack, the drone was quick enough to nail him, but wasn’t smart enough to achieve it, but the same was true for Trigger.

Speed versus guile. Mind versus Machine.

Cyclops was on the way, but couldn’t keep up. It seemed that it always came down to Trigger.

Those drones were getting better. It was a danger that could actually hurt Trigger if he’d let his guard down.

If his reflexes had been that little bit slower, if he’d blacked out in the hard turns, if he’d loosed that last missile half a second earlier or later, he might very well have become scrap instead.

But he didn’t and he wasn’t.

He’d faced the best pilot in all of Erusea and survived. He’d faced the most advanced drone and won. The legend grew, both in Erusea and Osea.

“If you get Three Strikes, you’re out.”

Now he was a Captain, Squadron Leader, Strider 1. Fully confirmed by Osea as an ace.

Someone new was keeping count now, adding on to a total that Count gave to Wiseman. Last he'd checked it was round-about a hundred-fifty air-kills and six aces.

He and Count went to work on Erusea’s northern forces.

Trigger found himself equally able to sink warships as he was warbirds. Gone were the days of torpedo and main battery shells, gone the superiority of the warship. He skimmed the waves low enough to feel the ground-effect, then spiked momentarily seven kilometres out. The exocets ripped whole ships apart before the crew even saw them.

There was nothing the enemy flotilla could do. Aircraft dominated the land, sea, and skies. And Trigger was the King of the skies.

LRSSG swept west, destroying every base in their path.

There were a number of radical changes from Spare Squadron. AWACS Long Caster actually fed Strider and Cyclops useful information rather than swearing and cussing them out like Bandog. He had a new wingman, albeit one that didn’t know how he flew, and he didn’t know much about either. And Count constantly fought against Wiseman.

But Count was finally learning how to work as a pair. Attached to Wiseman, he was safer than he’d ever been, and Trigger recognised the new skill Count was displaying. It was the same as Tabloid had, paired up with him. Freed from having to watch his own back, Count was free to prowl the skies like Trigger.

All in all for whatever reasons, Strider was more effective than Spare.

Huxian asked him why he carried three scratches, three strikes, on his aircraft. He didn’t answer at the time but found out later that Wiseman told her in private. Count disapproved of him keeping the strikes, but his fellow pilot did surreptitiously mark his own callsign with a little strike of his own underneath his tophat emblem.

They worked their way along the northern coast, the scourge of the Erusean north fleet. After their first battle they never got quite so lucky as to find a carrier at anchor, but enemy destroyers sank by the dozen.

The Arsenal-Birds still dominated those skies, but on all other fronts Erusea was withering.

Stonehenge, with its appropriate outer berm and Menhir defences, broke Erusea. To Trigger it was just another day. Mister X never showed, so he didn’t really get any thrills, though he did have to put effort into avoiding the Arsenal-Bird's AA missiles. Just another day.

Like a dam breaking, Osea was on the offensive, sweeping across the continent. Five hundred kilometres in five days. The limiting factor on the advance ended up being fuel supplies rather than enemy resistance.

There were occasional hiccups, the launching of Erusean ICBMs being the most prominent, but Operation Werewolf would stick in Trigger’s mind the most from this period. Not for any danger or thrill he experienced, but because of how one-sided this war could be.

Protecting Basilisk was the name of the game, but Trigger wrote the rules, and the rules said nothing left the ground. Like the fleets in the arctic ocean, the fighter squadrons over stonehenge, that day the Erusean ground forces learned that the only thing that could fight a jet was another jet.

When he finished that day, not only was his aircraft spotless, he hadn’t been locked. No ground fire had chased him. No fighter had gotten behind him.

Trigger actually enjoyed it. It wasn’t a roaring thrill like the one he experienced against Mister X, but the quiet contentment that he couldn’t have done a better job. Strider was tight. Even Skald and Count got along together after the battle. And Basilisk, having watched them lay down the pain, treated them like they were gods.

They rearmed, refuelled, and one week later they were above the capital of Erusea itself.

They knew they were coming. The majority of the Erusean airforce was in the air, ready to try and stop them.

Afterwards Trigger would learn that house-to-house fighting had been brutal. Mechanised infantry had been fought the toughest battle of the war, simply to gain control of streets and buildings which had little strategic significance, but any of which could hide a concealed sniper.

But realistically, the war wasn’t won on the ground. It never had been.

Freedom of movement won wars. The ability to attack, to retreat. If one became surrounded, without opportunity to do either, that was the end.

Aircraft controlled that freedom.

An enemy unit could be effective, or it could hide from aircraft. But it couldn’t do both, so occupied houses and rooftop snipers were the largest threat the Osean Marines faced. Thanks to Trigger.

“Three strikes, and you're out.” Or if you were on Trigger's team, "If you see Three Strikes, count to three, and the enemy are gone.

It had spread like wildfire amongst the Marines. Basilisk had come up with it, or maybe Count and Basilisk just disseminated it. Either way, he started hearing that kind of chatter over the radio on his gun runs.

He doubted the friendlies could even see the strikes, considering his speed and angle.

Once again he was untouched, though the same could not be said of the rest of the squadron, Strider two having backed out early after catching some flak.

Open skies, targets on rails, enemy fighters low and slow, he couldn’t ask for a better playground.

Apparently he wasn’t the only one thinking that.

Mister X came out of nowhere, smashed two ships, nailed Wiseman, and gave Trigger a run for his money.

And then IFF had broken down. He’d tried his best to pursue. He even got good tone on a heatseeker, but Mihaly ran straight for the intermixed formations and Trigger dared not fire. He’d learned his lesson from Harling’s death.

The battlespace was still confused, a handful of Erusean planes were intermixed with friendlies. Count had also learned from his own mistakes, and quickly had Cyclops and Strider lined up around Trigger. “Stick with Trigger,” went out on the radio, and soon the other squadrons followed suit.

He found himself flying back to base at the head of a forty five plane air-group.

And again, he felt hollow. He’d failed to down Mister X and another wingman had died for it.

He was the king of the skies. A title only contested by Mister X. But whoever held that title at the end of the war, would do so standing on a pile of corpses.

"Three Strikes and you're out."

He'd faced Mister X twice. He swore that the third time would be the last.


	3. All the Nations of the Earth

You never knew you loved something until it left you.

Luckily Count and Trigger had learned how much they loved IFF signals much earlier in the war, and had spread that love to the LRSSG almost immediately after their induction.

So when it broke down, they were ready. At least, more prepared than the rest of the world.

Sent to evacuate a VIP, Trigger didn’t really care if they were Osean or Usean or Erusean, it was in some ways easier than normal.

Trigger would swoop down on a combatant, visually eyeball them, and peel away before giving the go/no-go to Count, who was lined up behind him. Trigger marked targets and Count knocked them down.

Positive identification was lacking on occasion when faced with some Erusean units. They’d been briefed about a tentative collaboration between an Erusean faction and Osean forces, but the intel was laggy enough anyway. 

When a target was uncertain, they erred on the side of caution. If it fired on friendly units it went up in flames.

The general or commander or whoever they were protecting below them was apparently also collecting his own group of rag-tag combatants around him. Blobbing up might have been suicidal on any battlefield with functional artillery, but today was his lucky day, with comsats down the artillery was just as blind as the rest of them.

Stripped of their targetting systems, ground units on all sides were struggling to accustom themselves to old-fashioned radio communications. Overnight he’d watched Osean callsigns switch from GPS markers to six digit grid references and the resulting confusion that caused.

A week ago they were an unstoppable force. Now they were children, stumbling in the dark because the power is out.

And with all the fun on the ground, the skies weren’t clear either. 

Lots of fighters from both sides. But the highlight of the night was the rogue drones.

At first there had been four, disguised as Super-Hornets and escorting a C-130 transport, nice and tame flying in formation. Then the transport came under fire from some Erusean Conservatives, and the drones went off the handle engaging everyone.

Long Caster asked for a positive ID on the unidentified fighters, so Trigger made a quick climb and dive past the nearest unknown, confirming it as a legitimate target. 

It also gave the poor pilot a perfect view of his plane.

“Osean fighters. Where did they come from?”

“Break break. I saw three strikes.”

They wiped them up, then wiped up the drones too when they didn’t return to escort. Then they wiped the swarm of MQ-99s that were launched from somewhere below. An incredibly heavy response for an attack on a single transport plane. But it was dealt with, and the plane went on its way.

Afterwards Count tried to persuade Trigger that it had been the Erusean Princess aboard. His evidence was a bad quality recording of the radio conversation about Trigger’s three strikes, which the Princess must have seen out of the window.

It would be the Queen now, Trigger thought, after the confirmed death of the king. Though confirmed by Osean forces, Erusea might not yet be aware. Regardless, he found that unlikely. Princess Cossette would be kept safe and sound in some bunker, not flying through an active warzone.

Of course, Trigger was wrong. But it would take meeting her face to learn that.

It wouldn’t take long for them to cross paths again. LRSSG was headed to Tyler Island to link up with any friendly elements. A short hop over to the Lighthouse and Trigger would have circumnavigated the entire continent. While Tyler’s main claim to fame was the Mass Driver that used to be the main route to space, it was now merely a stop-over port before the elevator.

On Tyler there was even greater conflict than they ever expected. Contrary to reports, the airbase itself had never been captured, leaving the skies firmly in the hands of the Erusean pilots, at least that was until they’d split into factions.

The Conservatives and Radicals were having at one another, and Osea too, in a vicious three-way war. Battlelines were non-existent, and civilian presence was everywhere.

Trigger’s distinctive marks shone through once more as both friendly and enemy nets started chattering about the new air-support.

Enemy units fled. He actually watched through his gunsight as an Erusean tank crew bailed out and ran when he lined up on them. Word got around, “Count to three” and all that got Osean units to group up and retreat.

Somewhere in that mess was 444 Squadron.

It didn’t take long to find them, or rather it didn’t take 444 long to find Trigger. 

“Hey dumbass with the three scratches.”

Everyone, Strider, Cyclops, Long Caster was confused when Scrap Queen came on the net.

“Stick with Trigger and you’ll make it,” was Tabloid’s intro.

444 needed air support, and Trigger was glad to do it. But they lacked target coordinates.

And then, the stupidest thing he’d seen in the entire war unfolded.

A little girl charged a tank with nought but a smoke grenade.

In all honesty, she didn’t need to. Marking an enemy position would be good, but marking a friendly position was just as effective. Avril or Cossette could just have tossed the smoke outside and closed the door.

She probably didn’t realise she was putting herself in danger for nothing.

Which is why it was miraculous when she survived.

He dove immediately. No Oseans, in the light of day he could see the Erusean camouflage marking the vehicles.

One run, low and high speed, took out the closest and direct threats. A sharp turn, a second run on the enemy helicopters hovering above. A third slow circle and the wider perimeter was cleared. 

Then he came over them low and slow, and gave a waggle of his wings over the cheering refugees.

Once again, Count insisted that he’d heard Princess Cossette on that radio. This time Trigger begrudgingly agreed that it did sound like the princess. But neither of them had time. In fact neither of them even had time to say hello to anyone. It was another quick rearm refuel and they were headed out again.

And finally, Trigger got his showdown with Mister X.

Attacking Shilage Castle was perhaps a sure-fire way to do so. Neither of them was disappointed.

No friendly units this time. Just Strider and Cyclops, desperate for fuel and supplies. They would risk the tiger to steal its food.

It was harder than he’d ever tried. Mihaly had a new plane, new tricks, but he wasn’t getting any younger.

They danced in the air, twisted and dove through clouds. It would have been beautiful if the heatseekers were fireworks.

It was asymmetric. Trigger was in a worse plane by many definitions. Slower, less nimble. Theoretically Mihaly could have run circles around him but instead the old man was energy fighting.

At first Trigger thought that it was because the new fighter simply didn’t have the agility, but from comms he gathered the true reason.

Trigger was young. He could handle high-G turns well by tensing his leg muscles and forcing blood to his brain. It was something all fighter pilots were trained to do, and something he took for granted.

Mihaly couldn’t. And after both of them had run dry of flares, the best way to dodge incoming missiles was with high-G turns.

But only one of them could make it.

Mihaly Shilage was fighting a two on one. Himself versus Trigger and his own body.

So Trigger watched and waited. He saw how the old man slowed and flew steady after dodging a missile, and then he shoved another down the tail.

He’d won. The old man had bailed out and survived, but Trigger was the undisputed king of the skies.

So why did it feel so hollow?

Because he’d not fought Mihaly in his prime. He’d beaten a shadow of the man, crippled by time.

But they had their fuel and supplies, and now they had a final target thanks to Scrap Queen.

“Hey dumbass, if you want to bring the world back from the brink, go to the Lighthouse. You can see the future from there.”

Osea and Erusean Conservatives, linked up together, would assault the Lighthouse and put an end to the final Arsenal-Bird.

A concentration of fighters and warships the planet had never before seen, the largest and final battle of the war would be fought in the shadow of space.

It was, perhaps, where the war had started for Trigger. He left the safe hands of Mage, and joined the rowdy crew that was Spare. Many would say that it was a step down, a punishment, but looking back, it freed him.

He wasn’t considered a rookie anymore, he wasn’t treated with a soft touch or watched over. Tabloid, hell even Count, were better wingmen than Mage. So the Lighthouse was where the war started for him.

It was fitting that it should be where it ends.

He’d toured the entire continent. From the northern coasts to southern seas, Zapland in the east to Farbanti in the west. The Roca Roja flatlands to Waiapolo mountains. He’d seen every inch of that sky. He’d ruled all of it.

His one failure was at Gunther Bay, at Lighthouse. Now he would win there.

It was surreal to step into the briefing room and look around to see the other pilots saluting him. Clown, his old squadron leader, saluted him rather than the other way around.

He was group leader, Count quietly informed him. The guy seemed strangely proud considering it was Trigger’s achievement, but w/e.

Group One, Mage, Gargoyle, Skoll, and Rigel would go in first, punch a hole in the Radical’s fighter screen. Trigger and Count would be right behind with Group Two, Strider, Cyclops, and Sol. They, along with the fleet of warships, would destroy the Arsenal-Bird.

Their final act before launch was to take a white brush to each of their tails. Pilots got one strike right across the tail. 

Squadron leaders took two.

Only Trigger kept his three.

Unity in crisis. Tabloid would be proud.

And they went off to war.

The plan was flawed from the beginning. The enemy units composed of drone Super-Hornets, Raptors and Lightnings, able to turn harder and faster than flesh and blood pilots. The Coalition started taking serious damage, only mollified by Group Two.

And then the Arsenal-Bird arrived and the plan went out the window. The massed-strike failed, and instead Trigger went in. High and fast passes, repeatedly targeting the rear and underside, eventually shook the fuselage free and exposed its core.

It blazed with flames.

But at great cost. Tabloid was gone, died saving the refugees. And only a dozen of the coalition made it to the grounded carrier.

The two new drones, Hugin and Muninn.

They were trying to get the data they carried, the flight data of Mihaly Shilage in his prime, to the factories across the continent. An army of drones that all flew like Mister X. The war would never end.

Despite the misery, the death these drones could cause if they were allowed to complete their transmission, Trigger only had one thing on his mind.

These drones flew like Mihaly Shilage. Like a young Mihaly. The pilot he’d never gotten to match his mettle to. He couldn’t focus on any of that.

He wanted to fight them. Not for mankind. Not for honour and glory. Not even to say that he could.

But because he wanted to know if he could.

Was he the pilot he thought he was?

Was he king of the skies?

Twelve minutes later, looking down at all the nations of the earth, he got his answer.


	4. Epilogue - The Sky is the Limit

The world seemed dimmer now. Drab, colourless, lifeless.

Depression, one doctor had told him.

Maybe. His meds certainly helped sometimes, when he remembered to take them.

But what he truly wanted wasn’t in a bottle. Medicine or liquor.

It was up there, the deep blue.

“Does the colour of the sky mean anything to you?”

Trigger hadn’t had a chance to get back up in the air. But Avril didn’t stop teasing him about it. Count too.

Princess Cossette, soon to be Queen Cossette once the Erusean Parliament resolved a problem with succession laws, had some sympathy. But she agreed with Osean command that Trigger was needed more on as a figurehead than as a pilot.

Perhaps the only one with any real idea of what he was going through was the old king of the skies.

Mister X himself was the only one he could relate to. The old man had been grounded permanently. Any whisper of a high-G turn and his organs would rebel, violently. But it didn’t stop him from trying to sneak into the hangar at the nearby airbase.

No, Trigger couldn’t do that either.

So he waltzed from one city to another. Osean, Erusean, Usean, ping pong across the world, it made his previous tour de force look weak.

He was fed pieces of paper and auto-cues, and spoke wise and uplifting words his mind had not conceived.

And all during that he just wished he could touch that sky one more time.

Finally he broke, and made a dirty deal with one of the escort pilots to swap their places. He would fly their fighter in escort, while they would pretend to be him on the transport plane.

He was found out immediately when the control tower asked for a comms check, but someone with the authority let it slide.

And yet, it still felt drab.

At the end of the flight he got creative with what would count as ‘escort’, took the fighter for a high ride then a fast dive and a barrel-roll.

Nothing. He felt nothing.

Even flying didn’t seem to have that spark.

He talked to Mihaly about it, but the man he’d felt so similar to couldn’t relate. Mihaly just wanted the sky, and felt the same way every time he got it.

Perhaps it really was depression. That scared Trigger.

Would he never feel that high again.

Like Icarus, had he flown too high, to fall back to the sea?

Ionela Shilage, Mihaly’s eldest granddaughter posed one answer. Perhaps it wasn’t the act of flying that excited him so much, but the victory.

She told him of mountaineers who fell into the same depression he was in when they’d conquered the highest mountains. They repeated their feats, trying to reach that same high, but could never grasp it again.

Once you knew you could do it, where was the challenge?

She saw no solution. Her grandfather loved flying, but for Trigger, the sky was the limit quite literally. Nothing could truly top Hugin and Muninn for danger and nobody would ever willingly build them again, and of course the only other challenge was Mihaly, and the girls would kill him before he ever persuaded the man to get shot at again. Besides he didn't think it would be fair to rob them of whatever time they had left.

So that left him with nothing.

He’d conquered his mountain, conquered the skies, and was left looking down on a world he did not care for.

And then, one afternoon, he picked up a magazine out of boredom.

The main cover was an interview.

“Kei Nagase, Fighter Pilot to Astronaut.”

Perhaps when he was looking down at the world, he should try looking up.


End file.
